Canada’s Chalk River reactor, which makes large amounts of technetium-99m, will end production next month.

Next month, Canada’s Chalk River nuclear-research reactor will halt production of a medical isotope that is widely used in diagnostic scans. Any unplanned outages at the world’s remaining production sites could lead to severe shortages of the radioactive tracer technetium-99m until new facilities come online in 2017 and 2018, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine warns in a report released on 12 September.

Chalk River produces about 20% of the world’s supply of technetium; the rest comes from six other ageing reactors in Europe, Australia and South Africa. These reactors bombard highly enriched uranium (HEU) targets to produce molybdenum-99, which decays into technetium. Stockpiling the radioisotopes is impossible because of their short half-lives — 66 hours for molybdenum-99, and 6 hours for technetium-99m. As a result, supply disruptions can quickly translate into shortages at hospitals, as happened when two reactors shut down for repairs and maintenance in 2009.

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Source: Springer Nature